Antecedents to End Users' Success in Learning to Program in an Introductory Programming Course

Abstract

Multiple factors combine to affect end users' success in learning to program. The goal of this research is to empirically investigate several factors that may predict learning to program in an introductory programming course for end users. The findings showed that software self-efficacy, programming self-efficacy, and computer playfulness were not direct predictors of successful programming; however, together they influenced computer interest, which in turn affected performance. The contribution of this paper is a model of the joint effects of a set of factors for end-user success in learning to program in a formal course setting.